G.K. Chesterton never fails to amaze me. In fact, I’m really depressed that I hadn’t started reading his stuff until lately. I’m catching up now, though, so I might be able to read it all eventually. If anyone can be said to have a “rapier wit,” it is him. And the humor and beauty that comes out of his writing is hard to beat. Lately I’ve been reading The Everlasting Man and I usually don’t get through a single paragraph without hitting something enlightening, or inspiring, or heart-wrenching. I’m halfway through it now (it’s divided into two books) so I’ll probably post my thoughts on it soon.

Right now I want to explore a quote from another one of his works, Heretics, which, along with its successor, Orthodoxy, is probably a more familiar title. In this section Chesterton is examining a philosophy of the time, which I take to be some sort of prohibition sentiment, that says that one ought only drink wine for medical benefits and never to seek after pleasure in it. Chesterton responds by saying that drinking wine as medicine is the only truly dangerous and immoral way to use it. Why? Because in using it as medicine we are trying to get at something natural, something that we “ought not to be without; something that [we] may find it difficult to reconcile [ourselves] to being without.” Whereas in seeking after pleasure in drink we are seeking something unnatural and exceptional, something that unless we’re crazy we won’t chase after every hour of every day. To sum it up: “[i]t is easy to deny one’s self festivity; it is difficult to deny one’s self normality.”

Chesterton then expands on the idea of turning pleasurable drink into somber medicine. This type of seeking after a thing meant to be pleasurable because you need it is dangerous. We ought to drink because we don’t need it. That is the happiness of irrationality. To rationalize this happiness is to destroy it. Chesterton continues:

Walter Pater said that we were all under sentence of death, and the only course was to enjoy exquisite moments simply for those moments’ sake. The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw. Great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendour of youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in. In all great comic literature, in “Tristram Shandy” or “Pickwick”, there is this sense of space and incorruptibility; we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale.

It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of them as passing, or enjoy them simply “for those moments’ sake.” To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it. Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized. Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. I do not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I mean something with a violent happiness in it–an almost painful happiness. A man may have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for the moment’s sake. He enjoys it for the woman’s sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last a week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary. Once look at them as moments after Pater’s manner, and they become as cold as Pater and his style. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant.^[1]

Such a powerful message about true happiness. Do you find yourself assenting? Anyway, I want to examine just the sentence in bold. What is Chesterton contrasting here? “Gathering rosebuds while ye may” and “the immortal rose which Dante saw”; well, what are these things? The first you probably recognize. It’s from the first stanza of a poem by Robert Herrick called “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”, and in its time was responsible, along with other of Herrick’s poems in this vein, for restoring interest in carpe diem verse; that genre which loves youth and despises old age, and extorts the young to take advantage of the time they have. Not an altogether wrong message, but wrong-headed all the same. I’ll quote the poem in full (because I can).

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles to-day,

To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,

The higher he’s a-getting

The sooner will his race be run,

And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

Times, still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time;

And while ye may, go marry:

For having lost but once your prime,

You may for ever tarry.

I believe Chesterton means to say that “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” is a way of saying to seek after moments of happiness as if they were the very breath of life, and thus makes a mistake in seeking after “the moment for the moment’s sake”. It is essentially just another way of saying “the moment will be gone and it you will have missed it if you don’t grasp it now.” That’s true of moments like those described, but it misses the point; and in creating the hunt for such moments, turns it into a journey filled with despair. Because how could you have great joy if you are forever seeking after that which you must necessarily lose? You will never gain every moment. And since the moments are fleeting and the trek down from their high emotion much longer than the moments themselves, you will forever be chained to such a search in futility. The further you get away from such moments the more desperately you seek them till you are an empty and useless hungry void.

So what about the second part, “the immortal rose which Dante saw”? Here Chesterton is paraphrasing a part of the Divine Comedy, specifically canto 30 (and maybe 31) of Paradise. I don’t have even a remotely good understanding of the Divine Comedy, and I haven’t yet started Paradise, but I shall venture an explanation based on what I’ve read nevertheless. In canto 30 Dante sees a vision of an endless “river of light” from which issue ‘living sparks” that sink down into the flowers along the banks, and then “plunge back into the torrent.” This vision is then expanded upon when Dante drinks from the river. He sees the whole host of the heavenly saints as an enormous, eternal, snow-white rose that expands, spreads and multiplies even beyond the size of the Sun. It appears that this vision is the result of trying to grasp the continuous flow of time to eternity in a static picture of a single moment for the purpose of intellectual as well as spiritual understanding.^[2]

So what Chesterton is saying is that great joy does not seek after temporal moments which must come and go, rather it finds in those short moments an infinity from which it draws its happiness, but then the moment is gone. “Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant” is a fantastic creed; and true, I think. We find great joy in the immortal things, or in the mortal things that we understand as immortal. If that is true then we must also find the greatest of joys in the greatest of immortal things: that which nothing greater than can be conceived: the God of Anselm, the God of Dante, and, dare I say, the God of Chesterton.

1. Chesterton. G.K. Heretics, Chapter 7.
2. http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0045.03#nt.ci030_ln88